The Sin of Certainty by Enns Peter

Author:Enns, Peter [Enns, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperOne
Published: 2016-04-11T16:00:00+00:00

Our Pale Blue Dot

It’s no secret that the Bible and science don’t exactly see eye to eye when it comes to explaining how the world and cosmos came to be and why things are the way they are.

Evolutionary biology, genetics, astrophysics, and geology—to name just a few—have explained much of the universe around us through analysis, experimentation, and observation (some of which we glimpsed in chapter 2). These explanations are compelling and universally accepted among people educated in those fields (with occasional pushback on some details from a small minority). But they don’t square up with the Bible.

The Bible gives us a different cosmos altogether, some of which is laid out in the very first book and chapter, Genesis 1. We read there of an earth as a flat disk, a few thousand years old, that sits stationary in the cosmos with the heavenly bodies moving around it. A solid dome of some sort arches from one horizon to the other and keeps back the waters of the “deep” that lie above—the waters that represent the threat of chaos to make the Earth uninhabitable. Rain, hail, and thunder are in heavenly storehouses that God may use as reward and punishment for obedience or disobedience (Jeremiah 10:13; Deuteronomy 28:12, 22). All that we see around us—animal, mineral, or vegetable—was created by God as is.

Most Christians I know don’t lose sleep over these sorts of things. But they also see a deeper issue, a nagging buzz of discomfort that gets louder the more they think of it—and this has been a big issue for me, too: the immeasurably vast size of the universe. I know I mentioned this before, but it’s unsettling enough that I want to mention it again.

Our universe—to be precise, the “known universe”—is about 13.8 billion years old and 546 sextillion (546 plus twenty-one zeros) miles across; travelling at the speed of light (186,282 miles per second), it would take about 93 billion years to go from one end to the other. This universe contains billions of galaxies, with each one containing billions of stars that are millions of light-years apart. Add to all this the notion that about 85 percent of the universe is made up of something called dark matter. We live in a universe that is truly unfathomably large and awe inspiring, to be sure. But the thought of all this makes me freeze in my tracks.

Our cosmos isn’t just what we see up there, as it was in antiquity. The writer of Psalm 19 praises God for creation, for he sees God’s glory in the heavens: “The heavens! Just . . . wow. Look up there! Isn’t God awesome?!” Hooray for him. This may be all fine and good from an ancient Iron Age perspective, where physical reality is restricted to what you see with your eyes. But my “heavens” aren’t “up there.” There is no “up.” The “heavens” surround us and just keep on going—infinitely, for all intents and purposes.

Seventeenth-century philosopher Blaise Pascal wrote: “The eternal silence of the infinite spaces terrifies me.

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